Natives Close to Home

I've spent some time on small bodies of water close to home within the last few days, and I've caught some beautiful native fish.

Redbreast sunfish (Lepomis auritus) range from Central Florida north along the East Coast just into Canada.  They tend to like rocky or sandy streams and lakes, and will inhabit small ponds with connections to streams as well. Males and females show very different morphology during spawning time, and it takes only a quick glance to discern between the two. Dapping a foam beetle in the margins of a mill pond the other night, I caught great examples of both.

Male redbreast sunfish 

Female redbreast sunfish

Pumpkinseed sunfish (Lepomis gibbosus) range from the Eastern Georgia border to Northern Maine on the east coast, west through the Great Lakes to the far Eastern Dakotas, and back south into parts of Iowa, extreme Northeast Missouri, and Illinois. They occupy both a broader range than redbreast and as broader variety of habitats, from freestone streams to near blackwater swamps. Redbreast and pumpkinseeds can hybridize, though I still haven't found one in my years of sunfish hunting, despite having seen redbreast paired with pumpkineeds in the very spot I caught this beautiful specimen:

Colors that would make a brook trout jealous.

Redfin pickerel (Esox americanus americanus), a subspecies of American pickerel, ranges from the Lake Champlain watershed and extreme Southern Maine south to Central Florida, from the spine of the Appalachians to the coast, then around the southern tip of that range into Alabama and Mississippi. Redfin pickerel thrive in shallow, weedy water. Blackwater swamps and slow, meandering streams are their favorite habitats, though they can also survive in freestone streams within small pockets of shallower weedy water, which is where I found my favorite fish of the hundred or so I caught in the last three days, an absolute stud of a redfin pickerel.

Everyone, no matter where they live, has some kind of wild, native fish species not that far from home. Don't forget about them.

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